The Nosferatu Scroll

27

Bronson was no further forward. He was unfamiliar with Latin, and had spent most of that time reading through Angela’s translations of the pages of the diary, looking for something – anything – that might give him a clue about what had happened to her. He looked at the computer screen, his gaze unfocused, as he mentally relived the events of the previous two days, and the macabre mystery that they had become embroiled in. The desecrated tomb; the vampire’s diary; the dead girl in the cemetery; the three corpses jammed into the grave; the burglary of their hotel room, and, finally, the attack on Bronson himself and Angela’s abduction. Running through the sequence of events, two things immediately stood out.

First, the desecrated tomb and the vampire’s diary were clearly important, very important, to somebody in Venice. The only reason, he was convinced, that he’d been attacked was so that the group of men could grab the diary, and they’d needed to get him out of the way first. But what he still didn’t understand was why they had taken Angela as well.

Then he remembered his conversation with the carabinieri officer in the cemetery on San Michele. He’d mentioned to the Italian that Angela worked for the British Museum and, actually, that might provide some kind of a motive. Because of the burglary at the hotel, Bronson was fairly sure somebody in the Italian police force had leaked the information about where they were staying. Maybe her kidnappers had also learned that she was an archaeologist, and believed she could help them translate the text in the diary.

It was a stretch to reach that conclusion, but why else would anyone want to kidnap an English woman who spoke almost no Italian? Bronson immediately felt better, because it suggested an alternative to the only other reason why Angela had been kidnapped: that she’d been grabbed by a serial killer who was operating in Venice. And that was a possibility he simply wasn’t prepared to face.

The second factor that seemed obvious to him now was that the Isola di San Michele, the Venetian Island of the Dead, was inextricably linked with what had been going on in the city.

This set Bronson thinking about the four dead girls whose bodies had been found in the cemetery, and he decided to take a look at the pictures he’d taken out on the island, to see if there were any visible clues on the corpses. As he transferred the images from his camera on to the laptop – Angela had already downloaded all the still images and video films from her digital camera on to the hard drive – he acknowledged the possibility that he’d been trying to avoid ever since the attack, that the girls had been killed by the same people who were accumulating the vampire relics.

Setting his misgivings aside, Bronson concentrated on the images that were now appearing on the screen of the laptop. When he’d taken the video film of the police recovering the body of the first girl on the island, he’d been trying to use the camera as inconspicuously as possible. The inevitable result was that the video was jerky and frequently didn’t actually show the scene he’d been trying to capture.

He watched carefully as the two men emerged from behind the temporary screen carrying the body on a stretcher, and then saw a police officer step forward and unzip the body bag. The dead girl’s tumble of blonde hair filled the screen as Bronson had used the camera’s zoom lens to focus on her face. For the briefest of instants he saw her forehead, her open left eye – at the moment of death, the eyes don’t close serenely the way they do in the movies, but remain open and staring – the side of her face, her cheek and part of her neck.

Something struck him about what he was seeing, and he wound the movie sequence back to the point just before the police officer unzipped the body bag. Then he ran it forward in slow motion. This helped clarify what he was seeing, but he still couldn’t be certain. So he ran it again, this time advancing the video film frame by frame.

Three of the frames offered him the clearest possible view of the dead girl’s face, and he examined each of them carefully, enlarging one particular section to study it more closely.

The girl’s skin was marred, almost freckled, by dark marks, which Bronson guessed were either dried blood or earth from where her body had been dumped; the skin itself was mottled with the first signs of decomposition. But there were several marks that he didn’t understand, but which filled him with unease.

Bronson closed down the video and searched the hard drive until he found the pictures that he’d taken with Angela’s camera of their discovery of the three dead bodies in the cemetery and the subsequent events.

The first image he opened was the shot he’d taken through the hole in the slab over the grave. It was, by any standards, an extremely gruesome picture. The image showed the stone sides of the grave, the ancient coffin lying on the floor of the tomb, and the naked and decaying bodies of three young women dumped on top of it. Unsurprisingly, given the circumstance in which the picture had been taken, it was a little out of focus, and the flare of the automatic flash meant that some parts of the scene were so brightly lit that little or no detail was visible. But the upper corpse, the girl who’d been put in the grave last, was reasonably clear. Bronson enlarged the part of the picture that showed her head and neck, and studied it closely for some minutes. Then he sat back in his chair and shook his head. What he was seeing just didn’t make any sense.

In both the images he enlarged, he’d found what looked like the same type of injury: on the sides of the girls’ necks puncture marks stood out. He frowned. When any animal – a dog, a cat or a human being – bites, both the upper and lower jaws are involved. If it’s small enough, the object being bitten will have marks on both sides.

The twin puncture wounds used by Hollywood directors to portray the bite of a vampire are impossible to make unless the vampire’s mouth is capable of entirely encircling the neck of the victim, something that is at best extremely unlikely. In fact, any creature with jaws the approximate size and shape of the human mouth, whether equipped with oversized canine teeth or not, would leave bite marks on the side of a human neck completely unlike the neat twin puncture wounds of the classic vampire mythology.

The most likely shape of such a wound would probably be two semicircular marks made by the jaws, probably with deeper wounds where the longest teeth would have sunk into the flesh. And if the bite was delivered powerfully enough, quite probably the skin and flesh might be bitten through to leave an almost circular wound. And that, Bronson realized, was exactly what he was staring at in these photographs.

It looked to Bronson as if the people who were collecting vampire relics were far from the bunch of harmless nutters that he and Angela had assumed. Whoever they were, they’d clearly moved a long way beyond just collecting old books and ancient bones.

The girls in the cemetery might have been enthusiastic members of the group, for whom it had all gone badly wrong. But Bronson doubted it. He thought it was far more likely that they were innocent victims on whom the vampirists – for want of a better description – had been feasting.

The very idea was manifestly ridiculous, but Bronson couldn’t doubt the evidence of his own eyes. And what he’d seen on those images lent a still greater urgency to his search for Angela, because he now had no doubt that she was in the clutches of a group of people who had killed at least four women already, and would presumably have no qualms about increasing that tally.